


baby you can drive my car

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Soulmates, but also not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-09-20 15:28:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17025237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: They call them “soulmates.”  Probably because it leaves less of a sting in their mouths.





	baby you can drive my car

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tigbit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigbit/gifts).



> Prompt 3. Soulmates, either canon or modern AU. Could take this any direction you like. I love when people do world-building with this like considering how it would affect the society's laws and/or anyone's understanding of biology. Are there ceremonies? Is there some kind of system for finding your soulmate? If you go canon, you could think how different Kylo's life would have been if he'd had Rey as a soulmate earlier on. If you go modern, I love when Rey has that knee-jerk "not him" response but grows to love him. Again, open to anything.
> 
> This came out of a ridiculous conversation with a friend and I apologize in advance for using your prompt as a way to test-drive (pun intended) the ridiculous soulmates premise we came up with. I hope you will enjoy it. I also promise I’m not trying to drag the trope that I...chose to write about for this fic (you’ll see why I say this), they just started talking about their feelings and it needed to go the way it needed to go.

They call them “soulmates.”  Probably because it leaves less of a sting in their mouths.

-

Rey always assumed that she was a product of a bad matching.  Two soulmates who didn’t love one another. You would have at least thought they’d have loved the child.  But they hadn’t, and so she ended up in the state system. It’s the very least that the state can do: taking up the abandoned children of the people they failed to match properly.

-

Rey learned to drive when she was eight.  That’s young—she knows that’s young—and her feet had barely reached the pedals of the car as she’d shifted into first, into second, into third.   _ The sooner I know how to drive, the sooner I can get my license and then my soulmate can find me,  _ she thought.  

In retrospect, Rey can recognize the desperation in her child-brain at that.  Rejected by her family, but yearning for fated love. She wonders how many other children out there are just the same.  Probably a lot. 

There are movies and books about finding your soulmate.  There are magazines that she’s dug out of streetside trash cans that detail the best tips for finding them, or being found by them.  But the one thing they all have in common is a car.

Your license plate number is your license number.  The state matches your soulmate based on your license number.  That’s how they find you.

-

The first time that Rey hears a soulmate horn blast, she’s twelve.  Most car horns are angry beeping sounds—loud, long, and blaring. This one is like a tinny whistle that makes her clap her hands over her ears until it stops.  

She watches as all the cars on the street pull aside as the driver of the first car pulls up and rolls down her window to greet the driver of the second car.  Rey sees their matching plate numbers and she feels her chest expand with hope. It really happens. It really happens.

-

She gets her first car when she’s fourteen.  

But as she drives through the streets, she sees no sign of her matched license number.

And no one’s car whistles at her as she goes.

-

Rey finds the Resistance when she’s nineteen.  It’s an unexpected thing for her—she certainly never expected to fall in with people who wanted to bring down the government.  She’s a lowlife, and doesn’t have much to bring to the table.

But they take her and Finn in and one night, after a meeting in which Codename General gives a long talk about what they’re doing to infiltrate and upend the license matching process, Rey sees something she’s never seen before: Poe takes Finn’s hand, and kisses his cheek, and the two of them disappear.

Rey feels like she’s seen something dirty and immediately feels guilty.  That’s why they’re there, isn’t it? To  _ resist _ the idea that the only person you should kiss, should love, is your soulmate.  So what if Finn and Poe aren’t soulmates. Soulmates aren’t real anyway. Whatever made the two of them want to disappear—that’s what’s real.

And Rey tries not to be jealous—because no one has made any indication that they’d want to disappear with her.

And she tries not to climb into bed, wishing that she’ll find her soulmate.

Soulmates aren’t real.  They’re a lie the state tells you to make you feel like your life has meaning.

-

She runs errand for the Resistance—jobs that require a good driver.  She’s one of the best drivers in the Resistance because she’d started so young and she can drive any car.  But for the most part, she drives her own.

“It’s for the best,” Codename General tells her, “If you get pulled over, it’ll be way worse for you if you’re on a fake license.”

Rey nods grimly at that.  She knows from how she grew up that the one thing you  _ never _ do is fake your license.

But oh—oh how she wishes she had when as she’s driving back to the Resistance late one night, she hears that whistling sound and a sleek black car pulls up next to her, and rolls down the window and she sees his face for the first time.

He’s not  _ ugly _ .  Quite the opposite.  There’s something hypnotic about his long face, his dark eyes, his plush lips as he gives her a tentative smile and says “RE-34-0414.”

She gulps.  And nods. And as he’s parking the car to presumably get out and introduce himself, she throws her own car into gear and rubber screeches as she tears off into the night.

-

Rey’s driven getaways before. 

She doesn’t like to think of them much.  She turns off her lights and weaves through back alleys until she thinks—hopes—prays that she’s lost him.

Her heart is hammering in her throat. 

_ Why _ had she done that?  Right after she’d found him—after he’d found her?

_ Because it’s all a lie,  _ she remembers Codename General telling her gently.   _ A sweet lie, but a lie.  You should fall in love, Rey.  You deserve that much. _

She does.  She does deserve that much.  

_ He found me,  _ she thinks.   _ And now he’ll hate me. _

There’s no turning back now.  

She’s committed to the Resistance.  She has. And that means that she can’t have a soulmate.

Soulmates aren’t real, after all.

-

“I found my soulmate,” she tells Rose in the bunk that night.  She has to tell someone, and Rose is there. “Or rather—he found me.  And I ran.”

“You did the right thing,” Rose tells her.

She knows.

She does know.

But she can still see his face, his tentative smile as he’d clapped eyes on her and guilt wracks her.  She doesn’t know him, but he doesn’t deserve to have his heart broken like that.

-

Or maybe he does.  

Because she recognizes him on the front page of a newspaper, standing next to Snoke, looking like the  _ biggest, most evil, asshole  _ who could possibly work for the regime.

-

“If he works for Snoke, why didn’t he ever look me up?” Rey grouses at Finn.

“Maybe he thought it was an abuse of power?” Finn suggests, “Or maybe he saw that you were younger than him and didn’t want to be super creepy.”

“Yeah, because being assigned to me or whatever isn’t creepy,” Rey mutters.

-

That’s not the worst of it though.  The worst of it is what Poe tells her when she mentions it to him.

“You’re  _ Ben’s _ ?”

“Ben?” like he knew him.  Like he wasn’t actually named  _ Kylo Ren _ .

“Ben.  Ben Solo.  Han and Leia’s son.”

Their  _ son?   _ Their son works for Snoke?

-

Ever since she was a little girl, Rey has had dreams of falling asleep with someone.  Usually someone bigger than her. When she’d been little, she’d assumed it was a parent, someone to keep her safe.  When she’d gotten older, she’d assumed it meant that her soulmate would be taller than her. 

Now, Rey tosses and turns and tries not to imagine  _ anyone _ .  Leia had been right: she did deserve to fall in love.  But she can’t get Kylo’s— _ Ben’s _ —face out of her mind.

She swallows.

_ Should I find him?  Try to talk to him? _

-

Poe thinks it’s a bad idea.  So does Luke. Both of them have known Ben for years.  

“He’s irascible and unpredictable and he works for  _ Snoke _ ,” Poe tells her.

“This isn’t going to go the way you think,” Luke warns.

But that doesn’t stop her from going to the capitol building and sitting on a bench outside for several hours, wondering if he’ll come out for a coffee or a smoke or something.

She sits there long past sunset, and as the city grows dark around her, she starts to think that maybe  _ this _ was the fated part of it all: her sitting waiting once again for someone the system said belonged to her but no matter how long she waited, they wouldn’t appear.

A security guard shows up after a while and tells her she can’t sit there after dark.

So she leaves the little park in front of the capitol building and goes to where she’s parked her car several blocks away.

She spots the ticket first—blaring orange in the streetlights.

She plucks it out from under her windshield wiper and reads through it.   _ It’s not signed, it’s not valid. _  Which is a relief because she doesn’t have the money to go to court over it and she doesn’t want to have to borrow money from the Resistance to pay it off.

She spots Ben second—standing behind her car, staring at her.  

There’s no tentative smile now.  There’s no softness to his eyes. And Rey’s mouth goes dry.

“Why’d you run?” he demands and there’s a hunger in his voice that doesn’t quite match the way his eyes are so hard.   _ Purposefully hard,  _ she thinks.   _ Like he’s trying to hide how much it hurt. _  She doesn’t know him at all, but somehow she knows that’s the truth.

“You know why,” she replies and his brow furrows immediately in confusion.  “Because all of this,” she waves her hand around, “is a lie. Soulmates aren’t real.  And I don’t want to give my body over to the state just because they decided we were going to share a license.”

He snorts derisively.  “Of course. Someone who shares politics with my mother.  Fate does have a sense of humor.”

“Maybe you should listen to your mother,” Rey snaps at him.  “You have a mother who loves you—and a father. They aren’t soulmates.  Mine were but that didn’t work out half so well for them.”

He stares at her.  “How do you know my parents aren’t soulmates?”  And then his eyes narrow. “You’re Resistance.”

-

Rey grew up knowing about fight or flight. 

She never thought she’d be having to pick one—for the second time—in her second interaction with her soulmate.

_ He’s not my soulmate _ .  

Soulmates aren’t real.

-

He rounds the car—blocking her from the driver’s side.  He has long legs and he looks like he works out. She can run fast, but she doesn’t doubt that he could catch her and—worse—from the look on his face, she doesn’t doubt he’d try.

He looms over her in the darkness and all Rey can think of is how he’s taller than she is, bigger than she is, and how, if he were curled up behind her in bed, how safe she’d feel in his arms.

She snaps out of that one fast as he grabs her wrist.  “You are, aren’t you?”

“So what if I am?  This is  _ wrong _ .  Don’t you feel how wrong it is?  That we got assigned to one another and this is what we get for it?  How is that a system working?”

“Fine,” he says.  “If you don’t want it, I won’t force you.  How about that?”

“Fine by me!” she snaps back.

And that, she thinks, is that.

-

It’s not until later, as she’s trying to fall asleep, that she wonders if he might not try and get her arrested.  He has her plate number, he knows she’s Resistance.

But weeks pass and nothing happens and she thinks that it might all be ok.

Until it isn’t.

-

It isn’t because she finds Ben sitting in a back alley covered in blood.  

His nose is broken, his eyes are bruised and he’s holding his side where it looks like he was shot.

Rey knows soulmates aren’t real.  But she does wonder sometimes about fate as she drags him into the backseat of her car and tells him he’ll be alright, he’ll be alright, before throwing the car in gear and driving him to a hospital.

-

She has to give his license number to fill out paperwork while he’s being brought in for emergency surgery.  

Good thing she’s had it memorized for years.

The admin takes the clipboard from her, then pats her shoulder.  “We’ll take good care of him for you, dear,” and it’s not until she’s gone that Rey realizes that she’s shaking.

-

He comes out of surgery hours later and an admin comes to get Rey.  She doesn’t know why she’s still at the hospital, just that she is. His blood is drying on her shirt and when he looks at her through hazy tired eyes, he sees relief there.

“A system’s working if you’re here,” he says quietly.  “You could have just left me to die.”

“I would have brought anyone I’d found like that to a hospital,” she responds.

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t have cried over them.”

“I wasn’t crying,” Rey lies.

He gives her a smile.  “There are tear stains in the grime on your face.”

Rey stares at the window.  It’s dark out again—always dark out when she sees him for some reason—and she can see the streaks reflected back at her in the illuminated glass.

“It’s scary to find someone who may be dying,” she tries.

“Do you really think that we can’t love each other?” he asks.

“Do you really think we can if we don’t have a choice?”

“It could be making something good out of a sticky situation,” he tries.

“How’d you get shot?”

He grimaces.  “Hux.”

“And was working with him trying to make something good out of a sticky situation?” Rey asks.

Ben glares at her.  “That’s not the same.”

“Oh?  How not?  The system told you you had to work with him, so you did.  How is that not—”

“Because I never once was expected to care about him,” he says forcefully.  “Because I didn’t care about caring about him, or him caring about me. But I cared about caring about you before I even met you.  And you took me to the hospital when he tried to get me killed.” He gives her an intense look, his eyes so dark and serious and tired and other things that Rey doesn’t know how to identify.  “Fine. Fuck the system. Who cares if we end up together or not. But would you at least be willing to try? If it doesn’t work, I won’t hold you to it.” He does something with his jaw, like he’s trying to chew on something, but his mouth is empty.  He looks suddenly so much younger than he has at any other point that Rey has seen him.

She takes a deep breath.  

Part of her wants to say yes.

But she says, “Are you going back to work with Hux?”

His face stiffens.

“I—I don’t know.”

“He tried to kill you,” Rey points out.

“I know but—”

“But you like your job,” Rey says and she hates that she sees his eyes get nervous at the statement.

“I like my job,” he says at last, not looking away from her.  “And that’s going to be a problem for you, isn’t it. If you’re Resistance.”

“It’s not a problem for  _ you _ if I’m Resistance?” Rey demands.

“I don’t know,” he says slowly.  “I cut my parents out of my life, cut my uncle out of my life.  I don’t know if I want to cut you out of my life. And I won’t know if we don’t at least try, right?”

Rey flares.  “So I’m worth the effort, but your family isn’t?” She’s spent years longing for a family and yet he throws them away, the way she was thrown away.  She is halfway out of her seat when he says,

“I left my family because of my job.  Because there was no way that we could reconcile what they are determined is right and what I do.  That’s as much on them as it is on me.” She goes still and she stares at him. She doesn’t know if she believes that, but she can believe that he’d need to believe it.  For some reason, that softens the anger she’d felt moments before. For some reason, that makes her almost want to hope.

Which is why she hates what she has to say next—has to because she knows herself well enough to know what she can stand and what she can’t. “But you’re not planning on leaving your job.  If you were, you’d have said so already.”

“Rey—” he starts but she cuts him off.

“We can’t try if you’re going to keep working there.  Not because of the system, because of  _ you _ .  You’re asking me to care about you but still plan to work alongside those who would see you dead—who have tried to kill you.  I can’t do that. I can’t care about you if you walk back there. Even if I want to try.” She sees his eyes flicker, sees hope starting to glow in them so she forces herself to say, “Call me when you quit your job.”

And she finishes leaving, her heart in her throat.

-

He does.

Three days later.

And asks her out to coffee.

-

“What will you do now?” she asks him, blowing over the top of her latte.

He shrugs.  “Freelance, I suppose.  I’m not throwing in with the Resistance,” he adds.  “Just because I left doesn’t mean I’m suddenly a rebel.”

“No,” she agrees.  “Because you didn’t do it for them.  You did it for me.”

“Yeah,” he says.  “I did.” A beat, a pause.  “And me. I also did it for me.”

“Yeah?”  For some reason, she likes the way he says that.  There’s something frightening in the idea that he’d throw everything away for her because what if it didn’t work?  What if they didn’t work? What if he just went back to someone who tried to kill him.

“Yeah,” he says again.  “I don’t know what I’m going to be.  But I’ll work it out.” He smiles at her and it changes his face.  

He’s always had a hypnotic face, but Rey would never have called it warm.  Not until now. 

And she reaches out a hand under the table and finds his and he squeezes it and for some reason, somehow, everything feels like it might be all right.

-

There’s more to the story.  There always is. The first time they kiss, the first time they sleep together.

There’s a rapprochement with his parents; it’s harder than any side wants it to be.

Snoke’s regime falls apart, though not for reasons related to soulmates.

But the most important part of it all is that Rey has someone she can call her own—someone who found her, someone she chose, and that is better than a soulmate.


End file.
